Pine Needles

And we are laughing, our backs hunched up like children, us siblings sharing a game, letting our voices roll with the smoke that inhabits pool halls like this one. We are laughing, loud, obnoxious, burly laughter of ones who forget who they are and why they are there. We are laughing with our eyes shutting in and blinking back out to each other's drawn up faces, blank and tight as paper napkins wet from drinks, wet from thinking of things tiny as gray moths we thought of trying to forget that pushed themselves behind our eyes flickering, pushed back and did not stop, could not stop, our faces white as pale, as clean, as starting over, new slate caught in that flickering, fluttering pushing-on, more of us leaving in those laughs to go out and become thunder, become the children who trap thunder in their mouths or lightning bugs in jars believing the world to hold more than one world and that things can be clean can be starting over can be new fresh-slate left-behind over, over, over, "He'd have done pulled the balls back into the hole by now. He could do anything," says our brother, backing to the bar, "By now, he'd have pulled them all in clean and easy," like this, like death, like the man walking towards his own death who stops to check his watch, stops to think of the groceries he needs, who to call, who to avoid, walking towards his own death, pulling things he can't forget to the roof of his mouth like honey, like cedar "Yeah right, we walked those hills all night, got lost, some fault of something, the moon tickling us through pines. We picked needles and poked them into our wrists to stay awake. That was some fault of something," my sister chokes out, laughing, in the bar we went to to forget, to remember to lose what we had lost together and make it less sacred than it was, with moths and nameless green bugs catching the light, fluttering down to the green felt and disappearing to where we might have swallowed some laughing in the liquor crawling down our throats, burrowing out a hole in hearts connected to the head of a man, the body he loses himself in thinking, which one, we are laughing, which one of us? Was the man thinking when he crossed that street, which child did he think of as cars bore him down into pavement, him needing some kind of release from the honey lacquered things held in the back of the mouth he refused to voice because his words are magpies crowding sky melding into more, because he does not think to speak, of dropping balls heavy as silence after a long lost night, because his words, thick with feathers, lost in flesh, can't measure a heart or its pulsing or the pulsing of other hearts which go on beating breathlessly in the car of silence, like moths gathering to porch light, wanting to be heard and sung to, and reassured, even if only by echoes, because because words are too much and not enough, we laugh, unseen under the dusky pools over tables, too drunk to lie to each other, watching the sweet heavy white ball force itself into all the others aching to reach the black one and start a new game, we asked, we ask laughing, which one which one did he love more?